Jury Duty
Have you ever played a board game and had your token land on a space called "jury duty, lose 3 turns?" Well that is what happened to me.
Up to this point I had been rather successful in avoiding jury duty. When I lived in the City, I didn't get a summons for five years. When I lived in the East Bay, my number only came up once and all I did was sit in a room and was never called.
However this time it was different. Of the hundred or so people summoned, they chose 28 people as the initial candidates for the jury. I thought my luck had held out until my name was called as number 25. We all trooped into a courtroom (including the people not identified) and then sat through 2 days (!!) of jury selection.
The case was a civil matter, a plaintiff suing for damages regarding exposure to asbestos. A life long plumber, he had contracted colon cancer. These days the materials used in plumbing have little asbestos, but that was not true many years ago.
Many people, myself included, have had their life touched by cancer. Some potential jurors were excused because, under questioning by the lawyers, admitted it would be hard to sit through a trial that would remind them of the loved ones they lost to cancer. As they were excused, names from the audience were read out to take their place and the tedious questioning would begin over again.
They wanted to know whether we knew anyone on a long list of people that were mostly doctors. And whether we knew the dependents (companies that supplied asbestos materials). They asked whether we had been in lawsuits or been involved in any sort of litigation involving asbestos. One question that provoked a lot of comments was whether we thought that that there were too many frivolous lawsuits. A couple of people who voiced strong opinions were excused. So was a man that said he didn't trust doctors. A woman who said she hated lawyers due to a lawsuit she was involved in as a teenager did not survive the cut.
There was a lot of repeated questioning on whether we viewed corporations with suspicion and would naturally side with the "underdog", the plaintiff. The anti-globalization activist and the man who helped ill people with their insurance problems showed enough bias so they weren't chosen either.
It was almost like we had a pre-trial before the trial.
Bit by bit, slices of the juror candidates lives and interests were revealed, some of it very personal. Aspects of personalities that you would never be privy to unless you knew the person well. As a rule, we don't give voice to these sorts of personal matters and/or political opinions normally in the workplace or with casual acquaintances.
Finally, in the end the jury was chosen. I surprised I was chosen because I had been a primary caregiver for several months to my grandmother who had died of colon cancer. Perhaps my voicing my concern over the litigious nature of our society counter-balanced that.
Over the weekend, I thought about what I knew of the case. Did asbestos really cause colon cancer? We were asked to not research the case on our own, but to make our decision solely on the evidence presented to the court, so I refrained from googling the topic. Did I think it was right to ask a company to pay damages on a product that was manufactured in a time when the danger of it's construction wasn't well known?
I'll never really know what my answers to these and other questions would be. On the first day of trial, the case was settled out of court.
